Nat Turner's Rebellion

On the night of August 21, 1831, Nat Turner led a small band of fellow slaves into the Southhampton, Virginia, home of Joseph Travis, his owner. The slaves killed Travis and his family, and launched the bloodiest slave revolt in American history.

Nathaniel Turner was born into slavery on October 2, 1800. Recognizing the boy's intelligence, Travis allowed him to learn to read and write -- skills forbidden too most slaves.

When he was in his twenties, Turner began to have visions. In one, he saw "white spirits and black spirits engaging in battle". He knew, he later said, that he had been chosen by God to lead the slaves to freedom.

Turner himself planned the uprising. On that deadly night in 1831, Turner first killed the Travis family and then headed for Jerusalem, Virginia, enlisting more slaves along the way. During the next two days, violence reigned.

Some 70 slaves were killed nearly 60 white men, women, and children before the rebellion was stopped. As a result of the revolt, more than 100 slaves, many of them innocent, were shot to death or later tried and hanged. Turner was captured on October 30 and hanged on November 11, 1831.

As a result of Turner's rebellion, southern states enacted harsher slave laws. But the revolt strengthened the antislavery movement in the North.

The Donner Party

In July, 1846, a group of 87 westward-bound pioneers made a bold decision. They would take a new shortcut to California instead of using the Oregon Trail. Named for its leader, George Donner, the Donner party was seeking a new life in a new land. Instead, it found disaster.

The new trail turned out to be no shortcut. The trip was hard and slow, and some families had to abandon their supply wagons. The party also had to travel west across Utah’s  Salt Desert. Food was scarce when the party reached the Sierra Nevada mountains in October, much later than it had planned.

The trail the Donner party followed  was called Hastings Cutoff. It was named for Lansford Hastings, a well, known western guide. A book by Hastings praising the shortcut helped convince the Donner party to take the trail.

An early blizzard trapped the Donner party in the mountains. The settlers hoped the weather  would improve, but more snow fell. In December, some party members left on snowshoes to find help. The rest ate their animals and then the animals’ hides. Some of the settlers starved to death. Some survived by eating the flesh of their dead comrades. Only 40 people survived the terrible winter in the mountains.

You can access a teacher’s guide and some other information here and find diary entries here.

1849

In 1849, Zachary Taylor began his term as President of the United States.   Elizabeth Blackwell became America’s first woman doctor.  Stagecoach service began between independence, Missouri, and Santa Fe in the Southwest.  And the steamship California arrived in San Francisco with the first gold seekers from the East.  

The great California gold rush was onl

Actually the precioius metal had been first discovered in California a year earlier on January 24, 1848.   At John Sutter’s sawmill on the American River, a worker named James Marshall found a yellow nugget of what he thought was gold.  He showed it to Sutter, who said, “Well, it lks like gold.  Let us test it.”   The nugget passed all the tests.   There was gold in California =- mre  gold than anyone had ever imagined.

The news was slow to reach the rest of the US, but by 1849 people by the thousands were hurrying to California from every corner of the country.     They came by ship and they came by wagon train, and they were called forty-niners.  Gold was found all thrugh the mountains and many forty-niners     Gold was found all through the mountains and many forty-niners became rich.   But not James Marshall.  His search for more gold failed and he died a poor man. 

In 1849, when the gold rush began, there were 14,000 people in California.  Three eyars later there were 250,000.

Edgar Allan Poe

“Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’”

That line from Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Raven” is one of the most famous in American poetry.  Poe is also well known for his short stories, many of them tales of terror and suspense.  He has been called the father of modern mystery and horror stories.

Poe led a short and tragic life.   Orphaned before he was three, he was raised in Virginia by foster parents.  His failure to complete his education and his self-destructive behavior infuriated his foster father, who disowned him.  Penniless, Poe eaked out a meager living as a writer and magazine editor.   In 1836, he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm.  He was devoted to her, but their life was a constant struggle for survivial. 

In the 1840s, Poe won recognition for poems such as “The Raven,” the story of a lost love, and for chilling stories such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

“The Murders in the rue Morgue” was the forerunner of later detective tales.  But despite his growing reputation, Poe earned little.  After his wrife died in 1847, he was plagued by depression and ill health.  He died when only 40 years old. 

To earn money, Poe editied a gossip column for a woman’s magazine in 1846.